Day three was kind of divided into two parts: completion of Rails basics before lunch, then a grab-bag of more advanced topics after:

• sending email
• controller hooks and filters
• web services
• security
• deployment issues
• deployment using SwitchTower

Lunch itself was combined with the much-needed exercise of building a small app from scratch. Of course, my bud Bill (who came up from Dallas) and I burned up most of the allotted time cutting up in the back of the room over our lunch, and thus had only about 40 minutes to build the app. We did so by pairing-by-sharing, whereby he shared his hard drive and we worked on separate parts of the very same project. It worked out OK, but our app didn't turn out to be very sophisticated.

I really hope that Dave and Mike plan on creating an advanced RoR class, because in all, this class was not as deep as I'd have liked. I kind of felt as though I could have gotten nearly as much from going through Dave's excellent RoR book and following along with the Depot project on my machine. This is not to say that the class was bad - I know some folks appreciated it at the level it provided, and as I said before, you can't please everybody. However, I do think a class that focuses on actually building an app from start to finish, with the class perhaps dividing into teams, would be a big success. Perhaps the format could be: mornings spent covering the previous day's foibles, then some RoR feature training, then the entire afternoon spent applying the training.

That said, the class was a great way for me to immerse myself in RoR training to a degree which I probably would not have done on my own. I paid for the class myself (and used vacation time), and thus was quite compelled to take an interest. It was also a great networking opportunity, and having Bill in for a visit was fun, too.